Frayed
by Nonetoowell
Summary: Dave would always have the cold comfort of knowing they never fell out of love. Kurtofsky, oneshot.


Warnings: character deaths, mental illness

A/N: I came across a prompt somewhere that wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote a story, even though it already had a wonderful fill (I'm awful like that). I usually don't like writing unhappy things, but I just had to get this out of my system. Criticism most welcome! (Btw the numbers don't mean anything, I was just trying to break up the different scenes.)

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><p>"Karofsky."<p>

Dave paused in his reading. Being called Karofsky wasn't weird in itself. In high school that was all people ever called him. But over the past thirty or so years he had gotten used to being referred to as 'Dave.' David by Kurt.

Folding the newspaper down, he looked over his reading glasses at his husband sitting across from him. Eyes adjusting to the brightness of the New York winter morning after staring intensely at cramped Cheltemhan font, he observed the lost look etched on Kurt's face. His eyebrows were drawn down heavily, and his pinkish lips were parted in wonder as he stared unseeingly at Dave in the small kitchen of their townhome.

Dave took a moment to admire the youthful and angelic looks Kurt managed to maintain despite being in his fifties, before smiling and asking, "Something wrong, hun?"

"Oh, it's nothing," he answered distantly. He shook his head, feathery locks that had gone slightly dull over the years bouncing with the motion.

Dave looked him up and down dubiously. Kurt squeezed at the grapefruit in his hand, juice running down the bulging veins in his hand in tiny streams.

"Might want to tell the wannabe orange that," Dave gestured with the corner of the paper.

Kurt looked down and dropped the fruit as if it scalded him. Then he did something even more worrisome. He wiped the juice off on his new pair of slacks. Surprised, Dave set down the paper but Kurt was too fast for him. He was up from his chair and kissing Dave goodbye on the forehead, muttering about his workload at the theater before rushing out the door.

One

Dave and Rachel weren't really friends.

They could be left alone in a room together and end up having an in depth conversation when they found something in common every blue moon, sure. Other than that though, she was Kurt's best friend and Finn's wife and they had little reason to associate.

So when Kurt dragged Finn in the kitchen to intimidate him into answering questions of where his daughter planned on going to college next year, Dave wasn't offended when Rachel brought out a notebook and started scrawling in it. He absently watched her loop and dot away, her face looking unusually lined with concentration and her posture rigid.

He entertained himself with the various shapes she would contort her mouth into before growing bored and finally breaking the silence, "Didn't know you still kept a diary at your age."

Rachel looked up at him coolly. Thankfully he had built up an immunity to her imperious stares over the years.

"I'm trying to work out casting call times for next week."

Dave blinked dumbly. "Isn't that usually Kurt's job?"

Rachel suddenly looked guilty and glanced over at the kitchen. "I thought I'd do it this time. Kurt's seemed so stressed lately and doing a bit more on my end would at least help."

"So long as he still gets final say on how sparkly the costumes are," Dave responded with a half grin, feeling his joke fall flat as soon as he made it.

Rachel's face twisted into an anxious smile that Dave hadn't seen on her since she had to file for bankruptcy after college. "That's what he said when we first opened the theater together."

Two

The final straw was when Dave walked into their bedroom, only to find Kurt with his back turned and hunched over as he sobbed into his hands. Alarmed, Dave dropped his briefcase and went to his side, collecting him into a tight hug. Kurt dug his nails into his shoulders, babbling 'when' and 'how' through his choked cries as Dave unthinkingly rocked him in his arms.

Dave didn't understand, and became even more confused by the small trill of another voice sounding from somewhere in the room. He looked around, unable to process what was going on, finally spotting the phone lying on the bed.

Drawing the phone to his ear he heard Carol's distraught voice on the other end, asking over and over again if Kurt was still there.

"It's Dave, Carol. What happened?" he asked, Kurt finally coming down from his hysteria and whimpering quietly.

"_Kurt called asking to speak to his father_," she explained, sounding shaken. Dave wasn't feeling well himself at the news. Managing to placate Kurt's stepmother and hanging up the phone, Dave turned back to Kurt who was still hiding his face in his chest.

"Sweetie, why did you try to call your father?" He grimaced as soon as he asked, hindsight telling him that he shouldn't have started there.

"I just wanted to ask how he was doing now that he retired," Kurt sniffed, for once looking his age, "B-but Carol said he had a heart attack?"

Dave felt as terrified as Kurt looked. "Your father died seven years ago."

He didn't know how else to put it. He knew he could have been gentler. But his own mind had been reeling and tact wasn't a talent of his anyway. Kurt ended up crying for hours, and Dave couldn't do anything else but hold him. Finally Kurt dropped off into a fitful sleep, curling up defensively with his back facing the room.

Dave wasn't sure if he was jealous, his fate being one of no sleep at all that night. He lied in bed, alternating between staring at the ceiling and staring at his husband's back. He was kept up by the horrifying thought that maybe he'd have to breach the subject of therapy with Kurt. After everything they had been through, together and separately, he had always assumed he'd be the one reaching the end of their rope.

By the time the sky started to grow pale with weak morning light, he was trying to talk himself into believing that Kurt was just stressed and wanting to seek professional help was an overreaction.

Unfortunately Kurt doomed himself when Carol called back that afternoon and he spoke to her like the previous day had never happened. Because why would he call his father when he's been dead for years?

Three

Dave wasn't an angry person anymore. He'd learned to relax and take life one step at a time when he finally accepted that he was gay, and even more so when he finally left Lima.

But as a doctor explained to him that Kurt had early onset dementia ("Not Alzheimer's, though the confusion between the two is understandable.") he felt the sixteen year old bully he had buried away begin to stir. Years of fighting and insisting, and feeling like every medical office had given him the runaround, only to be told that yes something was wrong. No, nothing could be done about it.

He wanted to punch something. A reaction that felt natural, even after all this time.

The doctor wrote up a prescription, assuring him that the symptoms wouldn't be as severe as well as a prolonging of Kurt's lucidity. He looked at the orange bottle of drab colored pills, swallowed his resentment, and shoved them in his pocket. Driving them both home, Kurt stared out of the window with an expression of incomprehension that left Dave with the feeling he didn't understand what was about to happen to him. He wished he could cherish this moment, though. There was going to be that day where Kurt wouldn't be coherent but for the briefest of seconds before lapsing again. He needed to utilize every second he was still going to have Kurt as Kurt.

But he couldn't then, he acknowledged, openly glaring at their home when they got there. He considered flushing every lifeless, dull pill down the toilet and just going into the living room to lie on the couch with Kurt as he read the same book he'd been slowly plugging through for the past year. His plans were thwarted immediately when, as he went to retrieve the pills from his jacket pocket, he heard Kurt speaking. Thinking (Hoping) he was on the phone, he walked into the kitchen and saw Kurt cut off a lively conversation with a person that wasn't there, smiling at Dave like he was a welcome guest.

He gave Kurt his daily dosage, then locked himself in the guest bedroom and cried.

Four

He could always appreciate the difference in their builds. Kurt had grown to be surprisingly tall, and he was always thin and wiry no matter how much he exercised. He glided in place of walking. Dave on the other hand was big. He had managed to keep the bulky muscle he had built in his late teens, still able to lift impressive amounts of weight at his age. But he always took up more space than he was comfortable with, even as he felt his strength dwindle as the years wore him down. He had a habit of clumsily stomping instead of walking.

That day they strode through the park side by side, ignoring the chill settling inland from the ocean. Dave hated the cold, but Kurt was having a good day and asked to go out for some fresh air. He looked over at Kurt, who used to remind him of a birch tree, and saw a skeleton. Thin had become gaunt and pale had become deathly. He looked down at their entwined hands, and how much more frail Kurt's had become. Dave thought that if he hardened his grip in the slightest, all the bones would snap.

Stopping in front of a flock of Canadian geese, Dave fished in his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag of crumbled bread. He handed it over to Kurt who took it with childish delight, throwing the crumbs with a toothy grin. Dave guided them over to a bench, sitting down and leaning back on the hard wood with a long sigh.

Kurt looked over at him curiously, a knowingness stirring behind his now muddled blue eyes. Dave looked back, impassive for the moment.

"Not the most romantic date?"

Dave gulped. "So long as I'm with you, I'm happy." He swung and arm around Kurt's shoulders, pulling him in. Kurt rested his head on his shoulder and hummed, eventually coaxing Dave into a competition of who could beam the most geese on the head.

Five

The blanket on the bed was an ugly peach color. Dave had never been as into decorating as Kurt, but he felt that the color was somehow an abomination. Kurt would never stand for it.

Except that he would. He'd tolerate the blanket, the garish border of painted flowers on the wall, as well as the laced curtains. He'd even find contentment in them, the simplest things having come to give him delight.

Kurt was leaning on the overly fluffed pillow, cozy in his bed as he thumbed through all the different programs of stage shows Rachel had brought him that day. She politely dismissed herself with tears in her eyes when Kurt didn't recognize the productions as all the ones he wrote for their theater. Finn went after her a half hour later, figuring she needed time to collect herself. His own face was stony.

The week had been nothing but a march of familiar faces as they went to and from the room. Carol was staying at Finn and Rachel's, and Blaine had flown in from California last night despite his busy schedule.

Dave wasn't surprised. Entering someone into hospice care compelled people to do all sorts of things they normally wouldn't.

The night was late, and Dave managed to end the painfully awkward phone call between Mercedes and Kurt. He had thought nothing of reaching over and hanging up for Kurt after he missed the phone bed for the fifth time.

Settling back in the metal chair he had planted himself in for what seemed like a century ago, he was fully prepared to spend the rest of the night in the uncomfortable position when he felt Kurt staring at him. Sitting up again, he met his husband's appraisal with curiosity and found he was being eyed up in open surprise. Worried, Dave wet his lips and mentally checked where the call button for the nurse was.

"What are you doing here?" Kurt asked abruptly, looking him over with fear and disgust subtly playing across his face.

Dave found himself selfishly wishing for the day when Kurt wouldn't remember anything.

Six

Things never improved. Not that Dave expected them to. He just wished that all the memories Kurt drummed up weren't from the worst year of both of their lives.

Some days he loathed him, other days he pitied him. Dave wasn't sure which one he hated the most.

Then there were the days that Kurt remembered things that never happened. No matter how much Dave tried to correct him, he would still insist that he had played Happy Loman in his late twenties or that he majored in nutrition of all things. Dave suspected that these made up stories were just Kurt compensating for not being able to recall anything of his life but still wanting to talk anyway. He'd have a lonely look in his eye with every lie he unknowingly conjured, a desperation coming through that rooted Dave to his spot while simultaneously urging him to run far away.

Then later on came the days where he wouldn't talk at all. He would have trouble holding things, and sitting up on his own became a chore.

Dave had nodded off one afternoon after helping one of the new nurses settle Kurt down for some rest. He fell into an empty sleep, still vaguely aware of the noises both in and out of the care facilities that kept him from fully going under.

"David."

His eyes fluttered open briefly before dropping back closed.

"David."

Knowing he had definitely heard something that time, Dave opened his eyes and looked around blearily. Adjusting his sore back, he became aware of the warmth enveloping his hand. Kurt had reached out from where he was laying, the hand on top of Dave's light as a feather.

He felt tears prick at the back of his eyes as he fearfully drew up his gaze to meet with Kurt's.

Kurt smiled at him warmly, rubbing a thumb on his knuckles once he got his attention.

"I love you," he said, voice dry and thin. Dave ignored the unnaturalness of it and shot back a watery smile of his own.

"I love you too," he whispered, bringing up Kurt's hand and kissing it.

Seven

Dave never had to go back to Kurt's room again. Even more relieving, Kurt didn't have to stay there anymore.

He loosened his black tie as he kicked his feet up on the coffee table and took a long, soothing swig of whisky.

First his mom, then his dad, then Kurt's dad, then his best friend Andrew from college, and most recently Mr. Schuester's three years back when Kurt was still having 'good' days where going places was still possible. He bitterly remembered when he had been young and thought he was invincible. Those days he thought he'd have to have a walker and an oxygen tank before attending the funerals of people he knew would be par for the course.

Not that life had ever gifted him with such forward simplicity.

Sighing, he picked up a photo from the side table of Kurt when they first moved into the townhome, playing keep away with their old black lab. Dave looked down at the picture stolidly, draining the rest of his glass and soaking in the silence of the home.

He'd sell the place as soon as he could. Not to run away from painful memories, but because being alone in a town home that could comfortably fit two seemed so overwhelming at his age.

Tapping the empty glass and then holding it to his temple, he flinched at the cool surface stinging his hot skin.

He was heartbroken, but it wasn't the first time Kurt had done that to him. He took solace with the thought that Kurt had finally found peace after the soul crushing years of drawn out pain and misery.

Maybe, Dave dared to hope, he'd find a little bit of his own someday.


End file.
